Just woke up from this dream when Owen woke me up this morning. What follows is my best summary of the dream while I still remember it. Might not make much sense, but then, that’s not the point.
was at the cafeteria of my grade school (Hillside Elementary, Hastings-On-Hudson, NY) but I and my friends were all high school age.It was lunch time and we were sitting at a table near the back of the room (which I realize now morphed from the Hillside Cafeteria to the Hastings Middle/High School cafeteria to a place that seemed like a library with stairwells etc.). Friends at my table that I remember were Doug Carroll and Vinny Lumalcuri, but they didn’t know what I was about to do. I had purchased a plastic machine gun that shot small (braces size) rubber bands only it didn’t shoot them it more let them dribble out the barrel in a slow thick stream maybe only 2 or 3 feet in front of me, thus it was pretty harmless. I picked it up and started walking up to people and shooting them, causing several dozen little rubber bands to innocently bounce off their chests and arms onto their cafeteria tray, down their shirts, into their notebooks. I was expecting to get caught and stopped by a teacher, lunchroom monitor quickly but this didn’t happen so I preceded to shoot everyone I could until I finally heard that the principal was looking for me and saw her coming down the stairs in my direction so decided to stop and handed the gun to a nearby teacher who was standing near me but not confronting me.
The principal took me to her office, and the funny thing was the principal was Marian Jensen, the Dean of Students I worked for at Antioch College. She preceded to tell me that a number of students had been physically hurt and that the mess in the cafeteria was so extensive that they were having to pay overtime to the cleanup crews to clean it today and that I was going to have to clean everything tomorrow alone. I was also suspended for a week. I sat there in her office trying to explain why I did this and rattled off a number of excuses which made sense to me, but sounded really dumb once I heard myself saying it. It was something about the fact that I had been out the day before and that another student, David Warner, had shone a film he made and he was suddenly very popular. Why I would care about this, especially since I didn’t really know David much beyond that he was a jerk to me on occasion, usually in the presence of far bigger jerks like Mike Nealy, is beyond me, but somehow this motivated me to want to harmlessly machine gun my whole school, and get caught doing it. The principal/dean sat for a long time talking to me about the event, asking me why and how I felt, and explaining that all the students were unified in their feelings about this event and they were all mad at me, something I didn’t particularly care about.
After waking up I still feel like I just got in trouble, that feeling you have after you got a speeding ticket, or in an accident or just screwed something up, where you wish you could go back in time and undo it. “If I only…”
So ok what is my subconscious telling me? That I want to get caught doing something wrong? For what purpose, attention? From Marian Jensen??? I mean, she was my boss 10 years ago at Antioch and I guess the Dean of Students my last year or so, but I never particularly feared her wrath as an authority figure per se… did I? She certainly had me feeling pretty guilty after her lecture.